I am new to ichthyology and I need to extract the lower pharyngeal jaw from cichlid fish specimens fixed in formalin and preserved in 70% ethanol and I want to do it without destroying the specimens because of their rarity. I am looking for a publication or a tutorial explaining how to do. Can you help me?
Maybe Adrian or a colleague from his group would be able to help ;)
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Adrian_Indermaur
Hi Giorgio,
I have personally never used non-destructive methods to extract pharyngeal jaws. I've been told that someone passes from the gill, lifting up the operculum (rather than cutting from down "under the throat"). The claim is that this is a less denstructive way but I have never used it so I cannot confirm it nor give you any precise advice on this.
I guess that the most sure-fire and truly non-destructive way is to do microCT scans of them inside the fish.
I hope this helps...
Best,
Carmelo
Hello,
I agree with Carmelo, with CT scan you will have information on their morphology and also on the jaw position.
Moreover these virtual data can be easily stocked, used and shared and they will follow you even if you change your institution.... and be sure that they can be of great interest for ichtyologisst outside your fiel: indeed as a paleontologist I always need more and more information on bone and tooth morphology but this is often hard to find or to access.
Cheers,
Olga.
Hi Giorgio,
Agreed, micro-CT scanning is definitely the best option. If scanned at a suitably fine resolution, the detail that can be seen even in small specimens is remarkable and individual bones can be 'dissected' out and examined from any angle. The scanning process itself is straightforward enough, assuming you have access to a micro-CT scanner. However, the ability to reconstruct the scan data into images that can be easily manipulated depends a lot on the imaging software you have available. Packages like Avizo are good but expensive but there are a lot of free software packages available. I can't vouch for these but there have been previous discussions covering the topic (see link).
Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Ralph
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Can_you_suggest_a_good_software_for_quantitative_analysis_of_images_from_micro-computed_tomography2/1
Thank you everybody for the useful information and suggestions. Next step will be finding somebody helping me with a micro-CT scanner.
Cheers.
Giorgio
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Biological Science
- Zoology
- Ichthyology